All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

In August 2009, CBS News made a simple request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for public documents, e-mails and other materials CDC used to communicate to states the decision to stop testing individual cases of Novel H1N1, or “swine flu.” When the public affairs folks at CDC refused to produce the documents and quit responding to my queries altogether, I filed a formal Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the materials. Members of the news media are entitled to expedited access, which I requested, since this was for a pending news report and on an issue of public health and interest.

The Obama administration made a commitment to a “new era of open government,” as stated in a presidential memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On March 19, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder issued new FOIA guidelines to “restore the public’s ability to access information in a timely manner.”

Two months after my FOI request, the CDC has yet to produce any of these easily retrievable materials. Sadly, this is of little surprise. This has become standard operating procedure in Washington.

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Today Oprah and Dr. Oz joined forces and filed a federal lawsuit in NY against more than 50 companies that they say have been using their names and images to promote products that they didn't endorse.

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(CBS)

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Since 2001, thousands of wives and girlfriends have been assaulted at the hands of the soldiers they loved. Tonight on the a special primetime edition of the CBS Evening News, Katie Couric investigates a growing crisis in the U.S. military: the staggering numbers of military wives who have been beaten, raped or even killed since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began.

And behind those statistics are the faces of many survivors. Katie spoke with one military wife, Jessacia Patton, about how her husband changed in Iraq, the ensuing abuse … and how the military failed to help.

Last night, we posted a preview clip of one of Katie's interviews with a military wife who is a survivor of domestic violence. Below, a new clip, in which Katie asks Patton what she believes to be the military's greatest flaw in dealing with domestic violence.

Watch that clip here:

When Flight 1549 went down in the Hudson River, images and video of the plane floating, surrounded by ferries and rescue boats, abouded. But video of the actual ditching and the plane's actions before any emergency response arrived? It was rarely seen. Now, one of our Investigative Team producers, Pat Milton, has obtained newly released surveillance camera video captured from a Con Edison facility on Manhattan's West Side, which has a view of the Hudson river. You can watch it below:



Also, in exclusive video obtained by CBS News, a security camera from the Intrepid Air Sea and Space Museum in the Hudson River captured the moment flight 1549 touched down.

While Bernard Madoff, the financier accused of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, was in a New York courtroom Monday answering to prosecutors, lawmakers in Washington held their first hearing on Madoff's investment scandal.

Democratic lawmakers charged that the Securities and Exchange Commission had “failed miserably” in ignoring warnings that could have uncovered wrongdoing years ago.

But as CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports on the CBS Evening News, a crucial witness in helping determine how Madoff's scheme evaded regulators was a no-show: whistleblower Harry Markopolos.

He agreed to testify at first, but ended up telling Congress he was too physically worn down and needs more time.

Markopolos, A derivatives expert, first alerted officials ...

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Wednesday night the CBS Evening News, we aired the story of a small, once-peaceful Midwestern town that’s been turned upside-down by an alleged hit list and the secretive group that may be behind it. When Investigative Producer Michael Rey and Correspondent Armen Keteyian went to Shawano, Wisc., to check out the situation there, they found themselves confronted almost immediately on Main Street with some people who were not exactly happy to see them. The CBS team had been speaking with Mikel Lauber, a reporter with CBS affiliate WSAW. Watch what happens next:



And check out some of the other videos from onlookers or participants in the conversation that they’ve posted on YouTube.

Check out the full report here.

Sharyl Attkisson is the Capitol Hill Correspondent for CBS News.

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Rep. Paul Kanjorski, was just trying to do something great for his hometown: He got several million federal tax dollars to build an office building in Nanticoke, Penn., so that a major business had a place to operate and bring several hundred jobs to town. It was named the Kanjorski Center. But a few years ago, the business moved out of the city-owned Kanjorski Center, leaving Nanticoke stuck paying the $15,000 a month bill for the empty building.

Kanjorski's follow up plan was to build a city-owned parking garage for the empty city-owned Kanjorski Center in hopes of attracting new tenants. Once again, he turned to federal taxpayers for help, earmarking more than $5 million for the Kanjorski Center parking garage project.

Critics say federal tax dollars aren't meant to buy economic stimulus projects for every Congressman's hometown – there isn't enough money to go around as it is. Further objections came from local officials who said Kanjorski shouldn't be able to use an earmark to force the city to build and own another liability: a parking garage ...

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Sharyl Attkisson is investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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For years, members of Congress have been investigating financial ties between pharmaceutical companies and the government, doctors and researchers, research hospitals, colleges and universities. Sen. Charles Grassley, who has most recently been digging into money links between drug companies and the American Psychiatric Association, puts it this way: “I have come to understand that money from the pharmaceutical industry can shape the practices of nonprofit organizations that purport to be independent in their viewpoints and actions.”

In a letter to its members, the APA says it supports complete transparency and plans to provide Grassley with the information he's requested: "a complete accounting of APA revenues, except from advertising in our journals, from pharmaceutical companies, starting in 2003." The APA notes: "We are not alone; recent public focus on relationships between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry is a challenge for the whole field of medicine."

Indeed, the APA is not alone in being the subject of public focus and scrutiny for its relationships with the pharmaceutical industry. Tonight, on the CBS Evening News, we dig into the allegations of financial conflicts of interest among some widely-quoted "independent" voices in the debates over vaccine safety. We weren't as lucky as Grassley ...

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Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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In four short years, the ringtone industry has emerged from nowhere and has become a billion-dollar market. And just as fast, scam artists found a way to tap into the line. That's what's behind a major settlement of a fraud investigation announced today by Florida attorney general Bill McCollum, and it will impact cell phone customers nationwide.

Here's how it works: customers are charged for ringtones, wallpaper, joke-of-the-day, you-name-it on their cell phone bills ... charges they never authorized and services they don't want. The charges aren't properly identified on the bill as to what they are or where they came from.

If a customer does study his bill closely enough to catch the bogus fee and call the phone company to inquire, too often he's told that he "must" have subscribed to the service, that the charges are monthly and will go on indefinitely, and there's really no way to stop it. This has happened to an estimated untold millions nationwide.

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Sharyl Attkisson is investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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There are not many good excuses for sleeping on the job. Even fewer if you happen to be a tactically-trained security guards; the first responders if a terrorist breaks into a nuclear facility. Public lives are quite literally in their hands.

Yet according to the security forces themselves, there is routine sleeping on the job at more than one of the nation's nuclear power plants.

The case of the napping guards at Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania is the topic of our story tonight on the CBS Evening News. It might have never amounted to a story at all, but for a tenacious guard who, after being rebuffed by his own supervisors and feeling rebuffed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that's supposed to care, recorded his fellow sleeping guards over a period of months.

If not for the video evidence ... the video embarrassment ... the NRC, the plant's owner and the security company, Wackenhut, would likely have all just written off the claims as unsubstantiated. After all, according to three sources we spoke to, sleeping is part of an accepted culture at Wackenhut: nobody is really looking to catch anyone in the act.

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